No, Steve Jobs's Death Did Not Set a Twitter Record

The passing of Steve Jobs was a big deal on Twitter, but not as big a deal as Beyonce's baby bump.

All day, the web has been abuzz with reports that news of the Apple co-founder's death prompted a frenzy of tweeting that set a new record for tweets per second (TPS). That's thanks to an Australian social media monitoring firm, SR7, which estimated the peak TPS yesterday at 10,000.

In fact, according to a Twitter spokeswoman, at the time the news was spreading, around 5 p.m. Pacific time Wednesday, the microblogging service's internal data showed a rate of 6,049 tweets per second. That's faster than people were tweeting after the announcement of Osama bin Laden's killing (a little over 5,000 TPS), but well below the 8,868 TPS recorded during newly-pregnant Beyonce Knowles's performance at the MTV Video Music Awards last month.

To be fair, people continued tweeting about Jobs all night and all day, so the cumulative number of tweets for this event is certainly far higher. In fact, AllTwitter says over 15 percent of tweets published today included the term "Jobs."